German Christians
The German Christians ( ) were a pressure group and movement within German Protestantism aligned towards the antisemitic and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles. Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism within the German Protestant church and the attendant foundation of the rival Confessing Church in Germany. History The Imperial Period During the period of the German Empire, before the Weimar Republic, the Protestant churches (Landeskirchen) in Germany were divided along state and provincial borders. Each state or provincial church was supported by and affiliated with the regnal house—if it was Protestant—of its particular region; the crown provided financial and institutional support for its church. Church and state were therefore, to a large extent, combined on a regional basis.The ruler of each state was also the highest authority (summus episcopus) in that state's church. See generally the Wikipedia article on the German Empire and its constitutive states, as it existed before the end of the First World War. Monarchies of Catholic dynasties also organised church bodies territorially defined by their state borders. The same was true for the three republican German states within the pre-1918 Empire. Weimar With the end of World War I and the resulting political and social turmoil, the regional churches lost their secular rulers. With revolutionary fervor in the air, the conservative church leaders had to contend with socialists who favored disestablishment. After considerable political maneuvering, state churches were abolished (in name) under Weimar, but the anti-disestablishmentarians prevailed in substance: churches remained public corporations and retained their subsidies from government. Religious instruction in the schools continued, as did the theological faculties in the universities. The rights formerly held by the princes in the German Empire simply devolved to church councils. Accordingly, in this initial period of the Weimar Republic, the Protestant Church in Germany now operated as a federation of 28 regional (or provincial) churches. The federation operated officially through the representative Church League (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund); the League was itself established in 1922 by the Church General Assembly (Kirchentag), which was composed of the members of the various provincial churches. The League was governed and administered by a 36-member Executive Committee (Kirchenausschuss) which was responsible for ongoing governance between the annual conventions of the Kirchentag. Save for the organizational matters under the jurisdiction of the national League, the provincial churches remained independent in other matters, including theology, and the federal system allowed for a great deal of regional autonomy.For a fuller and more detailed account, see the article on the Confessing Church. The German Christians Ideology The German Christians were, for the most part, a "group of fanatically Nazi Protestants."Barnes p. 74. They began as an interest group and eventually came to represent one of the schismatic factions of German Protestanism. Their movement was sustained and encouraged by factors such as: :*the 400th anniversary (in 1917) of Martin Luther's posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, an event which served to endorse German nationalism, to emphasize that Germany had a preferred place in the Protestant tradition, and to legitimize antisemitism. This was reinforced by the Luther Renaissance Movement of Professor Emmanuel Hirsch.Luther's extreme and shocking antisemitism came to light rather late in his life. :*the revival of völkisch traditions :*the de-emphasis of the Old Testament in Protestant theology, and the removal of parts deemed "too Jewish" :*the respect for temporal (secular) authority, which had been emphasized by Luther and has ample scriptural support (Romans 13)Verses 1-7 are the most pertinent; verses 1-2 read as follows (New International Version): Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. The German Christians were sympathetic to the Nazi regime's goal of "co-ordinating" (see Gleichschaltung) the individual Protestant churches into a single and uniform Reich church, consistent with the Volk ethos and the Führerprinzip. Formation The German Christians were organized in 1931 to help win elections in the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, the largest of the independent Landeskirchen. They were led by Ludwig Müller, a rather incompetent "old fighter" who had no particular leadership skills or qualifications, except having been a longtime faithful Nazi. The group achieved no particular notoriety before the Nazi assumption of political power in January 1933. In the church elections of November 1932, German Christians won two thirds of the vote.Bergen p. 5. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and the process of Gleichschaltung was in its full sway in the first few months of the regime. In late April 1933 the leadership of the old Protestant federation, in the spirit of the new regime, agreed to write a new constitution for a brand new, unitary "national" church, which would be called the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche Evangelische Kirche or DEK). The new and unified national DEK would completely replace and supersede the old federated church with its representative league. This church reorganization had been a goal of the German Christians for some time, as such a centralization would enhance the coordination of Church and State, as a part of the overall Nazi process of Gleichschaltung. The German Christians agitated for Müller to be elected as the new Church's bishop (Reichsbischof). The Bishopric Unfortunately for the Nazis, Müller had poor political skills, little political support within the Church and no real qualifications for the job, other than his commitment to Nazism and a desire to exercise power. When the federation council met in May 1933 to approve the new constitution, it elected Friedrich von Bodelschwingh as Reichsbischof of the new Protestant Reich Church by a wide margin, largely on the advice and support of the church leadership.Bodelschwingh was a well-known and popular Westphalian pastor who headed Bethel Institution, a large charitable organization for the mentally ill and disabled. His father, also a pastor, had founded Bethel. Barnett p. 33. Needless to say, Hitler was infuriated with the rejection of his candidate, and things began to change. By June 1933 the German Christians had gained leadership of some Landeskirchen within the DEK and were, of course, supported by Nazi propaganda in their efforts to reverse the humiliating loss to Bodelschwingh.Evans p. 223.The new Reichskirche (or DEK) church constitution required a two-thirds majority for the election of its bishop and no candidate in the April contest could achieve this supermajority initially. After several ballots, Bodelschwingh prevailed by a landslide of 91 to 8. After a series of Nazi-directed political maneuvers, Bodelschwingh resigned and Müller was appointed as the new Reichsbischof in July 1933.The entire Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union (both Müller and Bodelschwingh were members of this largest regional church, which was of course only an administrative unit after the adoption of the new constitution establishing the DEK) was placed under police jurisdiction; pastors were fired, suspended and sometimes even arrested or placed under house arrest; and the German Christians and Müller carried on a vicious campaign against Bodelschwingh. Barnett p. 34. The Aryan Paragraph Further pro-Nazi developments followed the elevation of Müller to the DEK bishopric: in late summer the old-Prussian general synod (led by Müller) adopted the Aryan Paragraph, effectively defrocking clergy of Jewish descent and even clergy married to non-Aryans.In 1933 the Protestant churches in Germany employed about 18,842 pastors (1933); 37 of them were classified by the Nazi terminology as "full Jews" ( ). However, before the promulgation of the Nazi's racist Nuremberg Laws, there was no standard definition of who was a "Jew," or which Mischling would be deemed "Jewish" for purposes of Hitlerian racial policy, so the net would certainly have swept wider than this rather small fraction. The extension of the prohibition to address the wives of German pastors was surely, to many middle-of-the-road Protestants, shocking. See Barnett p. 33-36. The Evangelisches Pfarrhausarchiv (about in ) recorded for all of Nazi Germany 115 Protestant pastors with one up to four grandparents, who were enlisted in a Jewish congregation. Cf. Wider das Vergessen: Schicksale judenchristlicher Pfarrer in der Zeit 1933-1945 (special exhibition in the Lutherhaus Eisenach April 1988 - April 1989), Evangelisches Pfarrhausarchiv (ed.), Eisenach: Evangelisches Pfarrhausarchiv, 1988. No ISBN. With their Gleichschaltungspolitik and their attempts to incorporate the Aryan Paragraph into the church constitution so as to exclude Jewish Christians, the German Christians entered into a Kirchenkampf with other evangelical Christians. Their opponents founded the Confessing Church in 1934,The Confessing Church grew out of the Pastors' Emergency League ( ) founded by Martin Niemöller in 1933. See article on Confessing Church for more detail. which condemned the German Christians as heretics and claimed to be the true German Protestant Church. Impact of German Christians The Nazis found the German Christian group useful during the initial consolidation of power, but removed most of its leaders from their posts shortly afterwards; Reichsbishop Müller continued until 1945 but his power was effectively removed in favor of a government agency as a result of his obvious incompetence. The German Christians were supportive of the Nazi ideas about race. They issued public statements that Christians in Germany with Jewish ancestors "remain Christians in a New Testament sense, but are not German Christians." Also they supported the call from the Nazi party platform for a "positive Christianity" that does not stress human sinfulness. Some went so far as to call for removal of the "Jewish" Old Testament from the Bible. Their symbol was a traditional Christian cross with a swastika in the middle and the group's German initials "D" and "C". It was claimed and remembered, as a "fact", that the Jews had killed Christ, thus appealing to and actively encouraging existing anti-Semitic sentiment among Christians in Germany. Precursors 19th Century The forerunner of the German Christian ideology came from certain Protestant groups of the German Empire. These groups sought a return to perceived völkisch, nationalistic and racist ideas within traditional Christianity, and looked to turn Christianity in Germany into a reformed intrinsic folk-religion ( ). They found their model in the Berlin Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker, who was politically active and tried to position the Christian working-classes and lower-middle-classes against what he perceived as Jewish "Überfremdung". In 1896 Arthur Bonus advocated a "Germanization of Christianity". Max Bewer alleged in his 1907 book Der deutsche Christus (The German Christ), Jesus stemmed from German soldiers in the Roman garrison in Galilee and his preaching showed the influence of "German blood". He concluded that the Germans were the best Christians among all peoples, only prevented from the full flowering of their spiritual faculties by the materialistic Jews. Julius Bode, however, concluded that the Christianisation of the Germans was the imposition of an "un-German" religious understanding, and that Germanic feeling remained alien to it and so should remain exempt from it.Rainer Lächele: Germanisierung des Christentums – Heroisierung Christi, in: Stefanie von Schnurbein, Justus H. Ulbricht (Hrsg.): Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne. Entwürfe „arteigener“ Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende, Königshausen und Neumann GmbH, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-8260-2160-6, S. 165–183 20th Century On the 400th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, in 1917, the Flensburg pastor Friedrich Andersen, the writer Adolf Bartels and Hans Paul Freiherr von Wolzogen presented 95 ThesenSee The Ninety-Five Theses of Martin Luther. on which a "German Christianity on a Protestant basis" should be founded. It stated : For the authors of the Thesen, the "angry thunder-god" Jehovah was the same as the "Father" and "Holy Ghost", that Christ preached and that the Germans would have guessed. Childlike confidence in God and selfless love was, to them, the essence of the Germanic "people's-soul" in contrast to Jewish "menial fear of God" and "materialistic morality." Church was not an "institution for the dissemination of Judaism", and they felt religious and confirmation materials should no longer teach the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, nor even the New Testament, which they held to be of Jewish influence that had to be "cleaned" so that the child Jesus could be used as a model for "self sacrifice" and "male heroism". In 1921 Andersen wrote Der deutsche Heiland (The German Saviour), in which he opposed Jewish migration as an apocalyptic decision: Against the "contamination by Jewish ideas", mainly from the Old Testament, the Churches and Germany should (he argued) be "mutually benefits and supports", and then Christianity would win back its status as "a religion of the Volk and of the struggle" and "the great exploiter of humanity, the evil enemy of our Volk would finally be destroyed". In the same year, 1921, the Protestant-dominated and völkisch-oriented League for German Churches ( ) was founded in Berlin. Andersen, pastor Ernst Bublitz and teacher Kurd Joachim Niedlich brought out the twice-monthly The German Church ( ) magazine, which in 12,000 articles advanced the Bund's ideas. Jesus should be a "tragic-Nordic figure" against the Old Testament's "religious idea", with the Old Testament replaced by a "German myth". Each biblical story was to be "measured under German feelings, so that German Christianity escapes from Semitic influence as Beelzebub did before the Cross." In 1925 groups such as the Bund united with ten völkisch, Germanophile and anti-Semitic organizations to form the German Christian Working Group ( ). The Christian-Spirit Religious Society ( ), founded in 1927 in Nuremberg by Artur Dinter, saw more effect in the churches, striving for the 'de-Judification' ( ) and the building of a non-denominational People's Church ( ). The proposed abolition of the Old Testament was in part fiercely opposed among Christian German nationalists, seeing it as a racist attack on the foundations of their faith from inside and outside. The theologian Johannes Schneider, a member of the German National People's Party ( or DNVP) (a party fairly close to the political aims of the NSDAP), wrote in 1925: In 1927 the Protestant Church League ( ) reacted to the growing radicalization of German Christian groups with a Churches Day in Königsberg, aiming to clarify Christianity's relation to "Fatherland", "Nation", "Volkstum", "Blood" and "Race". Many local church-officers tried to delineate, such as with regards to racism, but this only served to show how deeply it had intruded into their thinking. Paul Althaus, for example, wrote: On this basis, the radical German-Christians ideas were hardly slowed down. In 1928 they gathered in Thuringia to found the Thuringian German Christians' Church Movement ( ), seeking contact with the Nazi party and naming their newsletter "Letters to German Christians" ( ). Pagan and Anti-Christian Trends Alfred Rosenberg's book The Myth of the Twentieth Century ( ) resonated in these circles and gave them renewed impetus. His polemic against all "un-German" and "root-stock" elements in Christianity was directed against the Christianity and the denominational organisations of the time. Marxism and Catholic Internationalism were attacked as two facets of the Jewish spirit, and Rosenberg stated the need for a new national religion to complete the Reformation. The Associated German Religious Movement ( ), founded in Eisenach at the end of 1933, was also an attempt to create a national religion outside and against the churches. It combined six earlier Nordic-völkisch orientied groups and a further five groups were represented by individual members. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer became the group's "leader and representative" by acclamation, and other members included the philosopher Ernst Bergmann (1881–1945), the racist ideologue Hans F. K. Günther, the writer Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, the historian Herman Wirth, Ludwig Fahrenkrog and Lothar Stengel-von Rutkowski.Ulrich Nanko: Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung. Eine historische und soziologische Untersuchung; Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 1993 Attempts to 'de-Judify' the Bible Some churches remained led by German Christians until 1945. In 1939 with the approval of 75% of the German Protestant churches the Eisenacher "Institute for Research and the Elimination of Jewish influence on German Church Life" was founded, led by Walter Grundmann. One of its main tasks was to compile a "People's Testament" ( ) in the sense of what Alfred Rosenberg called a "Fifth Gospel", to announce the myth of the "Aryan Jesus". It became clear in 1994 that the Testament's poetic text was written by the famous ballad-poet and proprietor of the Eugen-Diederichs-Verlag, Lulu von Strauß und Torney. Despite broad church support for it (even many Confessing Christians advocated such an approach, in the hope that the disaffiliation of 1937 to 1940 could be curbed), the first edition of the text did not meet with the expected enthusiastic response. After-effects After 1945, the remaining German Christian currents formed smaller communities and circles distanced from the newly-formed umbrella of the independent church bodies Evangelical Church in Germany. German Christian-related parties sought to influence the historiography of the Kirchenkampf in the so-called "church-historical working group", but they had little effect from then on in theology and politics. Other former members of the German Christians moved into the numerically insignificant religious communities known as the Free People's Christian Church ( ) and the People's Movement of Free Church Christians ( ) after 1945. Notes and references Bibliography (English) (Bergen) Bibliography (German) * Friedrich Baumgärtel: Wider die Kirchenkampflegenden; Freimund Verlag 19762 (19591), ISBN 3-86540-076-0 * Otto Diem: Der Kirchenkampf. Evangelische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus; Hamburg 19702 * Heiner Faulenbach: Artikel Deutsche Christen; in: RGG4, 1999 * Rainer Lächele: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Glaube. Die „Deutschen Christen“ in Württemberg 1925–1960; Stuttgart 1994 * Kurt Meier: Die Deutschen Christen; Halle 1964 Standardwerk * Kurt Meier: Kreuz und Hakenkreuz. Die evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich; Munich 20012 * Klaus Scholder: Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich **Volume 1: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen, 1918–1934; Berlin 1977 **Volume 2: Das Jahr der Ernüchterung 1934; Berlin 1985 * Günther van Norden u.a. (ed.): Wir verwerfen die falsche Lehre. Arbeits- und Lesebuch zur Barmer Theologischen Erklärung * Marikje Smid: Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932–33; München: Christian Kaiser, 1990; ISBN 3-459-01808-9 * Hans Prolingheuer: Kleine politische Kirchengeschichte. 50 Jahre evangelischer Kirchenkampf; Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1984; ISBN 3-7609-0870-5 * Joachim Beckmann (ed.s): Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland 1933–1945. It: Evangelische Kirche im Dritten Reich, Gütersloh 1948 * Julius Sammetreuther: Die falsche Lehre der Deutschen Christen; Bekennende Kirche Heft 15; Munich 19343 * Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz (ed.): Christlicher Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus. Theologische und kirchliche Programme Deutscher Christen; Arnoldshainer Texte Band 85; Frankfurt/M.: Haag + Herchen Verlag, 1994; ISBN 3-86137-187-1 ::it (S. 201–234) Birgit Jerke: Wie wurde das Neue Testament zu einem sogenannten Volkstestament „entjudet“? Aus der Arbeit des Eisenacher „Instituts zur Erforschung und Beseitung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsch kirchliche Leben“ * Karl Heussi: Kompendium der Kirchengeschichte; Tübingen: Mohr, 198116; ISBN 3-16-141871-9; S. 521–528 External links * Religion in the service of an ethno-nationalist construction of identity: discussions on the examples of the "German Christians" and Japanese Shinto * Olaf Kühl-Freudenstein: KRAUSE, Reinhold. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. Vol XXIV (2005), Spalten 968–974 * Die evangelische Kirche und der Holocaust * [http://www.humanist.de/kriminalmuseum/ns-index.htm Humanist.de: Die christlichen Wurzeln des Nationalsozialismus] * [http://ludens.elte.hu/~aherzog/archiv/text16.htm Andreas Herzog: „Wider den jüdischen Geist“. Christian Anti-Semitic arguments 1871–1933] Category:Nazi organizations Category:Nazi Germany Category:Religious organizations established in 1932 Category:Christian movements Category:Christianity and antisemitism Category:Protestant denominations, unions, and movements established in the 20th century de:Deutsche Christen fr:Chrétiens allemands pl:Niemieccy Chrześcijanie pt:Movimento Cristão Alemão ru:Немецкие христиане sv:Deutsche Christen zh:日耳曼教会